This invention relates generally to the World Wide Web, and, more particularly to communicating by sound the contents of Web pages coded in HTML.
The World Wide Web ("the Web") is an international collection of pages of data. Each page of data is written using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Documents coded using HTIML include both plain text and markup text, the latter of which is generally referred to as a "tag." Tags in an HTML document are not displayed to viewers of the document; tags represent meta-information about the document such as links to other HTML pages, links to files, or special portions of the HTML page such as body text or headline text. Special text is typically displayed in a different color, font, or style to highlight it for the viewer.
Because of the visual nature of the medium, the Web presents special problems for visually-impaired individuals.
Further, not only are those individuals excluded from viewing content displayed by an HTML page, but traditional forms of representing visual data for consumption by visually-impaired individuals cannot conveniently accommodate the rich set of embedded functionality typically present in an HTML page.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus which makes HTML pages accessible to visually-impaired individuals.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus which represents the contents of an HTML page with sound data rather than visual data.